The Undertakers: End of the World (19 page)

“Now!” she shouted.

And, just like that, the
bavarak
began.

As the six Corpses advanced on us, Maxi Me and I immediately closed ranks, putting our backs against one another and pointing our weapons outwards. We did it without thinking, the synchronized tactic so automatic that I didn’t even really notice it until after it happened. Then, in a voice tight with tension, I heard the chief whisper, more to himself than to me, “Same brain …”

The first of the Corpses attacked, shying away from the sword and coming at me instead. He was one of the males, and he swung his arm with the speed and force of a Major League Baseball bat. I saw it coming and ducked, feeling his fist tousle my hair. Then I jammed my Taser into his armpit.

As he stiffened, I whirled to my right. At the same instant, Maxi Me whirled to his left, which turned us—still back to back—in a tight circle. Once our tiny circle fully rotated, William raised his sword and smoothly removed the deader’s head.

One down.

The surrounding horde, which had been cheering in that grunt-like way of theirs, suddenly went silent.

Chew on that awhile, wormbags!

The other five closed in around us. One of them, a particularly big male, seemed to take charge, motioning for the others to wait for an opportunity. As the seconds ticked by, the chief and I kept rotating, often changing direction on a dime. It was like I knew what he was going to do before he did it, maybe because, if I’d been him, it’s what I would have done.

I’m watching my own back.

Somehow, I had become a single warrior with two heads, two pairs of eyes, and four arms.

And, despite everything that was happening and was
going
to happen before this long, terrible night was over—it was
cool
!

With a gesture from their leader, two of the females came at us, picking their moment. One of them grabbed my wrist, rendering my Taser useless. She squeezed viciously, her ragged black nails digging into my skin, the touch of her flesh almost painfully cold. Crying out, I tilted my head to the right, trusting William to help me. Sure enough, a split second later, Maxi Me thrust Vader back over his shoulder, past my ear, and right through the Corpse’s temple.

The creature let out a sound almost like a sigh.

Then she released me and dropped.

But the distraction had worked. With his sword up over his shoulder that way, William had exposed his flank, and the other female lunged at once, driving a dead fist into his midsection and doubling him over. A second later, two more of them dashed forward, both of them reaching for me.

I managed to stab one in the eye and give the other just the right kind of kick to the knee. The first one staggered back, half-blinded but not stopped. The other tripped and fell sideways, not from pain, but from a broken kneecap that could no longer hold his weight.

Then the female who had hit William clutched me from behind, wrapping icy hands around my head, squeezing brutally. My skull fairly exploded with pain, almost making me drop the pocketknife.

Almost.

I threw back an elbow, putting all of my weight behind it, striking her in the face and managing to loosen the grip of one of her hands. By then, William had recovered enough to come up behind her, wrap an arm around her thin blue neck and twist.

The deader’s neck snapped with a loud
crack
.

Three down.

“You okay?” I asked him, a little breathlessly. Half my face felt numb.

“Duck,” he said.

I ducked.

Vader flashed past me a second time and caught the remaining female in her remaining eye, blinding her completely. With a frustrated moan, the monster reached for him, but he pulled back the sword, pivoted, and neatly decapitated her.

That left just two—both males. One of them was the leader, who looked a lot less confident than he had thirty seconds ago. I risked a glance toward the sidelines, where Emily had her hands over her mouth and Steve sat in a semi-conscious lump on the rain-soaked tarmac.

With a cry of rage, the last two deaders abandoned all strategy and came at us from opposite directions, probably intending to crush us between them, even if it cost them their hosts. After all, they could always get
other
hosts. But the price of losing this
bavarak
was likely to be their very lives.

I didn’t have to tell William to go left and he didn’t have to tell me to go right. We just did it. I went low, rolled under the Corpse leader’s reaching arms, and zapped him in the back of the leg.

He convulsed and dropped face first onto the street, breaking his nose with a sickening wet crunch. Getting my feet under me, I jumped on his back and jammed the blade of my pocketknife deep into the base of his skull.

Five down.

The last of the Corpses, however, had tackled Maxi Me, pinning his sword arm under one heavy boot, while his hand found William’s throat. I sprinted toward them, unable to use my Taser without zapping the chief along with the deader. But Number Six saw me coming and I ended up running straight into a well-timed sucker punch that put me on my back and sent my head spinning.

Somewhere nearby, Emily cried out a warning.

I turned my head and spotted a seventh Corpse, sent in by the furious Queen. He was another male, even bigger than the guy I’d just put down, and he clearly meant to trample me flat.

That’s cheating
, my stunned mind thought bitterly.

Why am I surprised?

Frantically, I looked back at Maxi Me, who raised his left hand, the empty one that his attacker wasn’t pinning. The chief’s face had gone deep purple, his eyes bulging out of their sockets from the pressure on this neck. But the hand he held up remained rock steady.

Without a moment’s thought, I threw him my pocketknife.

He caught it, flipped it over expertly in his hand, and jammed the blade into the Corpse’s temple. Then, as the dead guy’s grip loosened, his center of gravity shifted, and William’s arm got free. Taking instant advantage, my older self tossed Vader to me.

I snatched the sword out of the air, spun on my heel, and lopped the seventh deader’s head right off his shoulders.

Both of the remaining attackers fell in heaps onto the wet tarmac.

Done.

Slowly, William climbed to his feet and came to stand beside me. He was coughing dryly, but the normal color had thankfully returned to his face.

“We win,” he told Corpse Helene.

For several mile-long seconds, she stared at him—at
us
. All around, the deaders were silent statues. And around
them
, the city itself seemed to hold its breath.

Then the new Queen began to applaud, slapping the palms of her stolen hands together in a steady rhythm. One second. Clap. Another second. Clap.

She’s slow-clapping us.

That can’t be good.

Trust a Corpse to make applause sound
that
sarcastic.

“You promised to let us go!” I exclaimed.

Corpse Helene smiled, still clapping.

“I lied,” she said.

Allies and Enemies

The Queen came forward, still clapping, while the dead that surrounded us, ten or maybe twelve levels deep, looked on with silent malice.

The rain worsened, becoming so heavy that everything outside a circle of maybe twenty yards was obscured behind shifting curtains of falling water.

I glanced over at Emily, afraid she’d come running to our defense, which wouldn’t do anybody any good. But instead she stayed with Steve, who lay sprawled at her feet, as out of it as ever. Brain swelling probably, from the beating the deaders had given him.

I’d seen that kind of thing before.

Corpse Helene stopped about six feet away, her mock congratulations finally over. Menace poured off of her like a second stench. Her current host wasn’t big or particularly fresh. But she was a Royal, and that gave her terrible strength and speed. And while, between us, William and I had managed to put down seven of her minions, I knew better than to think that we could stand against
her
.

She could kill us in a heartbeat if she wanted to.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” the Queen said, her voice carrying well despite the thundering rainfall. “But I can’t let you go, not without testing my theory. The two of you fight so
well
together … impossibly well, in fact. Obviously, you share a strong connection. And why not? You’re the same person, after all. Identical, except in years of life. So how can I help but be curious?

“Now, I know what Professor Moscova said about timelines. But he’s not exactly at his best, is he? Besides, the opportunity for experimentation is simply too delightful to pass up. That’s why I’ve decided to kill young Mr. Ritter, here and now, and see how his death affects his older self.”

“No!” William exclaimed. He started to move forward, maybe to stand between the Queen and myself. It’s what I would have done. But I put a hand on his chest to keep him where he was. To my surprise, it worked. He looked at me in desperation, but didn’t make another move.

Meanwhile, Corpse Helene ignored his outburst. “I wonder if you will vanish before my eyes,” she said thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t that be a treat? If I were the gambling sort, I might offer odds. As it is, I think I’ll simply break the boy’s neck and settle the question.”

She leered hungrily at me, anticipating my terror. But I just looked back at her, keeping my face carefully neutral, though my heart, already pounding from the combat, had jumped to hyperspeed.

“I’ll give you a moment, Will Ritter,” she said to me. “A few seconds to pray to whatever god you wish. But I’m curious about that as well. Your world has … had … so many religions after all, creeds that were different and yet all the same. Throughout history, you’ve fought wars over who was right and who was wrong. So tell me, boy: What do
you
believe in?”

“Believe in?” I echoed, speaking loudly and doing my best to hold her eyes. I needed to keep her attention fixed on me—nothing but me. “You’re asking what I believe in?”

“I am,” she replied, her grin widening. Her teeth were yellow and visibly loose, her lips as black as coal. “Before you die, answer me that one question. And, in return, I promise you a quick and painless departure.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I even managed a thin smile. “Thing is: After all the battles I’ve won and the friends I’ve seen die … I guess I still believe in the same thing I’ve believed in since I first laid eyes on you stinking zombies. And yeah, I just called you a zombie.”

She seemed unperturbed, though she made an oddly human-looking twirling gesture with her hand as if to say:
Get on with it.

So I got on with it.

“So you want to know what I believe in?” I said. “I believe in Helene Boettcher
.”

Something big dropped out of the sky and landed on the Queen of the Dead.

The
something
had a lean, muscled body with ten long, jointed limbs, almost like spider legs, except each ended in a razor sharp pincer. Her head was a bizarre round lump atop her torso, which seemed able to slide anywhere along her body. She had four eyes, set equidistant around what passed for her skull, and each was a different color: red, green, yellow and blue.

Right now, the red one was shining brightly.

From behind me, I heard Emily scream.

I didn’t blame her. The sight of this creature was enough to send anyone into a mind-numbing panic. But I had the advantage of having known she was here. I’d spotted the Corpse Eater about a minute ago, moving like a wraith through the ruins of Independence Mall, waiting until the last second to leap high over the heads of the wall of deaders and land on her prey.

That prey was now pinned, the Queen’s stolen body crushed under the weight of the
thing
that was, beneath it all, the real Helene Boettcher Ritter.

A phrase rattled through my head, put there by a mind other than my own.

Sorry I’m late.

I grinned. “You’re timing’s perfect. Like always.”

William stiffened in shock. “Helene?” he whispered.

The Corpse Eater’s head rotated, showing him her green eye.

Maxi Me uttered something halfway between a laugh and a sob. He knew as well as I did what he was looking at. Helene Ritter had managed to fight her way back from the induced coma that the Corpses had placed her in. Through sheer strength of will, she’d overcome the Queen’s vampire-like sucking of her life and memories. Then she’d managed to turn it around, not only freeing herself but using her connection to Corpse Helene to take on the
Malum’s
native form, what their actual physical bodies looked like on their mysterious homeworld.

She’d become the Corpse Eater.

And, for a Corpse Eater, a green eye was the rough equivalent of a hug.

Around us, the deader horde exploded into noisy activity. A single word rippled through their ranks.
Gravveg!
The word meant “abomination” in
Malum.

Then all hell broke loose.

Some of the Corpses fled, scattering in all directions. Others stood motionless from shock—as if cemented to the street.

And a few, the bravest few, charged us.

William still had my pocketknife and I still had Vader, so we both went to work with those. Under ordinary circumstances, we’d have been overwhelmed in seconds, but these circumstances left ordinary in the dust. For one thing, a Corpse Eater was in our midst, making even the toughest deader quake with terror.

And for another, that Corpse Eater was—well—hungry.

She started by snipping the Queen’s head off, a simple thing for one of the monster’s pincers. This didn’t kill Corpse Helene, of course, but it certainly took the fight out of her. Then, in true Helene fashion, the great and terrible
gravveg
threw herself into the fray.

The Corpse Eater moved with impossible speed—as fast, if not faster, than any Royal, her limbs a blur as she slashed and cut and struck, again and again. Deaders went flying, often in pieces, and this time the groans I heard had nothing to do with cheering. Maxi Me and I did our part too, or tried to, but we were totally outclassed.